The rotating disks in conventional disk drives are prone to vibration or flutter. This flutter causes the information tracks on the disk to move in a radial direction. If the suspension or load beam supporting the slider or data access head is not able to accurately follow this radial movement, detrimental track mis-registration (“TMR”) can occur.
Suspensions and related structures capable of compensating for TMR are generally known and disclosed. See, for example, the Shimizu et al. U.S. Pat. No. 5,999,369, the Reiner et al. U.S. Pat. No. 6,088,192, the Williams U.S. Pat. No. 6,738,229 and the Oh et al. U.S. Patent Publication No. 2005/0007702.
Some known designs utilize extra components (e.g., shims) to be added (e.g., welded) to the suspensions. Designs of this nature require an additional piece of material that is added in the assembly process and placed precisely along with other components of the suspension which can create issues with component location and clamping schemes that are available to use as the parts get smaller and smaller. Also, incorporating another component into the suspension requires the associated process features to be incorporated (such as carrier strips, struts, and de-tabbing features), inviting additional processing steps to the manufacture of the product. These features also increase the amount of scrap in the manufacturing process. Other designs achieve this offset by offsetting the entire suspensions during the swaging process or by building the offset into the baseplate/mount. Both of these options can be difficult from a head suspension assembly standpoint and may not be proven effective and/or efficient in high volume applications. Furthermore, the capabilities of such processes are unproven from a part performance standpoint.
As is evident from these references, a suspension having radial head motion capability will experience less TMR There remains, however, a continuing need for improved suspensions and suspension components capable of compensating for TMR.